counterterrorism

Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will not be treated as an "enemy combatant" following his April 19 apprehension  and subsequent hospitalization, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Monday.  "We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice," Carney said, adding that the courts system had proven many times its ability to handle terrorist cases.

Americans who have thought about terrorism during the previous week are more likely to call the police over a person who shows signs of inclination toward terrorism, finds a weighted survey of the public conducted for the Homeland Security Department.

FBI and National Security Division investigators are not adequately documenting their use of established techniques for investigating possible financing of terrorism, the Justice Department's office of inspector general says.

"I think the biggest strategy mistake of us going into Afghanistan was that that campaign was based in anger," he said. "9/11 had happened, we were very emotional, someone had to be hit and really hit hard. So we went into this tribal society...not knowing the language, the culture, the clans and so on."

In a hostage situation, "even law enforcement will use targeted killings, and it will do so without judicial preapproval when the threat to the lives of the hostages is adequately serious," said Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and co-founder of the Lawfare blog. "Nobody takes the position that such actions constitute unlawful extrajudicial killings."

"Policy makers should distinguish between outgoing and returning foreign fighters and treat the latter as more of a threat," the article says. "Prosecuting all aspiring foreign fighters as prospective domestic terrorists has limited preventive benefits, because so few of them, statistically speaking, will go on to attack the homeland."